


Ordeal and Resurrection

by NonPlayerCharacter



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-26
Updated: 2011-07-26
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:27:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NonPlayerCharacter/pseuds/NonPlayerCharacter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vriska finds out what, exactly, awaits her after death. It isn't pretty.</p><p>But, even in the darkness of death, there is hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Vriska: Endure

**Deep down, you knew.**

“Just flip the fucking coin, Neophyte,” you snap, jabbing your finger at Terezi impatiently. Grim-faced, she obliges. As the coin arcs upward, a vague feeling of uncertainty and deja vu washes you, but you shake it off quickly, not letting Terezi see that she rattled you. Both you and her know that she can’t beat you, not at a simple coin toss, or much of anything else, really. Looking pathetic, maybe? She slumps slightly as the coin bounces–once, twice–and lands face down, fingers tightening around her silly little sword cane. You suppress a laugh, but allow your grin to widen at your victory, a foreshadowing of the greater victory to come, no doubt.

You raise a hand to give her a tiny, mocking wave and then turn away from her. That was fun, but you’re done with fun and games. Time to solve clean up your own mess. Time to kill Bec. You take a confident step forward, and flex your wings.

Less than a second later, a length of sharpened metal slips between your ribs and punches through your heart and sternum. You stare down at Terezi’s blade for a second in shock before she pulls it free, completing her cut. You take another step forward, stumble and topple unceremoniously to the ground. Slowly, in agony, you die.

 **You knew that all stories end, and that your story, the tale of Vriska the scoundrel, didn’t earn a special exemption by merit of your being its protagonist.**

“Just flip the fucking coin, Neophyte,” you snap, jabbing your finger at Terezi impatiently. Grim-faced, she obliges. As the coin arcs upward, a vague feeling of uncertainty and deja vu washes ov-

No! Oh no, oh no no no no no. She did it, didn’t she? She stabbed you in the back when you trusted her. She killed you on the edge of your greatest triumph. How could she?! How dare she?! Rage fills your chest as the coin bounces twice and lands face down. To hell with this. Apparently, you’re getting a second chance, and you aren’t going to waste it repeating your mistakes. Still, it isn’t like you have to fight her. She can’t fly, so if you don’t let your guard down, there’s no need to worry about her.

Despite the fury boiling inside of you, you feel your mouth curl into your earlier smile. Again, you raise your hand in mocking farewell and turn away from her, stepping forward with a confidence you don’t feel. Terror blossoms in your mind as you flex your wings.

You don’t want to die, not again. Not agai-

 **It could have ended many ways ...**

The scene repeats itself over and over, like a damaged, looping film of some sort. By the fourth repetition, you’ve found the encounter’s rhythm, allowing you to relax and think a little bit until the inevitable, painful end. Clearly, this being some sort of punishment or test, so you try to endure it as best you can.

“Just flip the fucking coin, Neophyte,” you snap, again jabbing your finger at the simulacrum of Terezi with non-existent impatience. Again she flips the coin, only this time, it lands with the undamaged side facing up. For a few moments, you simply stare at it in disbelief, and then you let out a sigh of relief. When you look up, Terezi is standing less than a foot away from you, grinning that massive, shark-toothed smile of hers.

Then she stabs you. Again.

She allows you to slide off of the end of her sword and stalks away, leaving you starting upwards, unable to move or breathe or do anything but silently roil with pain and fear and rage. As you lie there, you hear two pairs of footsteps slowly drawing nearer and nearer to you. One stops a little distance away, while the other continues its approach. Eventually, a human face, John’s face, comes into view. Even as you try to gather enough energy to wheeze out a plea for help, the small section of your think pan still devoted to logic starts throwing up warning flags, but you can’t focus enough to pay attention to them. Why won’t he help you? Can’t he see that you’re hurting? Dying?

He just stares at you, his expression sad, even pitying. It hurts and hurts and hurts and he just stands there.

You hear the other set of footsteps resume its advance, and another, paler human comes into view. Your suffocating think pan somehow manages to associate the impassive, feminine face with the Rose girl, the one you told John to kiss. You finally manage to gather enough breath to say something, only to waste it in a wet cough as something catches in your throat. You taste blood.

Darkness begins closing in on you, but you give it one last try and stare imploringly at John. He looks back, and just as you think he might buckle, Rose places a hand on his cheek. He glances over at you once more, then nods and walks away with her, leaving you to drown in darkness and blood.

 **... in violence and betrayal ...**

You stand loosely, legs partially bent in preparation for the coming strife, dice clutched tightly in your fist. Eridan stands to your right, his face set in a grimace almost as tense and anxious as you feel. To your left, Gamzee smirks vacantly, his face marred by three ragged, purple cuts; blots of dull green splattered across his juggling club. Eridan loses his nerve first, swinging his wand towards you with fear and murder in his eyes. You move just a little faster than him, releasing your dice and hurling yourself to the ground. Despite your quick reaction, his bolt only barely misses your head, and its shockwave opens a small, stinging furrow in your cheek.

Your dice clatter to the ground, netting you a excellent roll: a quartet of eights and a run from one to four. Azure letters dance in the air, spelling out the words “Paradox Backlash” before splintering into strange, unfamiliar runes. Eridan screams as his wand turns black and explodes, riddling him with inky, insubstantial shards. Black veins spread from each tiny splinter-wound, and he collapses, writhing in agony.

You reach out for your dice, but a juggling club smashes down on your hand, shattering it. Gamzee. You try to pushes yourself up and backwards, but another blow comes down on the side of your right leg, breaking the knee. You scream and try to maneuver away again. Again, he strikes you, this time breaking your left foot. You get a glance at his calmly smiling face before he slams you in the chest, knocking you into the air from the sheer force of the blow. You land and roll a few feet, feeling your ribs twist and shift in your chest, seemingly with a life of their own.

Gamzee takes his time. When the darkness finally comes to claim you, you welcome it.

 **... or in silence and despair.**

Bec lunges at you again, slashing downwards at you. You angle your sword up, catching the blow neatly. He delivers another trio of slashes towards your legs and lower body follows, but you’re ready for them. The two of you have been at this for five minutes, and you’ve gotten a pretty good handle up on his style. He attacks with brief, erratic bursts of extreme aggression, then partially retreats–either teleporting or flying out of reach–before attacking again from another angle.

However, despite the addition of the Octet’s power and Mindfang’s expertise to your own, impressive capabilities, the fight is starting to wear you down. You need to end this, one way or another.

So, as always, you gamble. The next time Bec whirls on you to begin his attack again, you slightly relax your guard. Bec takes the bait and lunges forward, perhaps not recognizing it as a trap, perhaps not caring. At the last moment, you dart forward as well, ducking under his sword. You grip Mindfang’s sword tightly and drive it, two-handed, into his chest.

The two of you jerk to a stop, only inches apart. Bec’s eyes widen in surprise, then narrow again as his rage returns. You realize, a little too late, that he still has a one option left. He snaps at you, but you manage to pull away quickly enough to prevent him from tearing out your throat. Instead, his jaws close on your right shoulder, teeth scraping against the bone. Can’t pull away now. Not if you want to keep your arm.

You grit your teeth and slam head against his as hard as you can. He reels back slightly, and you manage to yank your shoulder out of his mouth. You close your left hand around Mindfang’s sword again and wrench it out of his chest, ripping open his ribcage with its hooked tip. He tumbles to the ground, blood pouring from the gaping hole in his chest.

You consider saying something pithy before he dies, but your eyes wander over the bodies and the urge vanishes. You take his head off with a left-handed swing of Mindfang’s sword and then toss the sword to the ground. You toss Bec’s body off the edge of the platform, make yourself a bandage out of what small scraps of clean fabric you can scavenge from the bodies and tidy them up as best you can. They’re just bodies after all. You’ve seen a lot of bodies, both living and dead. No problem. You can handle this.

It doesn’t work. You cry for a while, and eventually you feel a bit better, but that relief fades, soon enough.

For an eternity, you wait in the silent stillness of the dead Incipisphere. Sometimes you sleep, sometimes you don’t. It matters little. You are alone.

 **Of course, you knew better than to hope for a happy ending. Rather, you sought one out, as aggressively and directly as you knew how to.**

 **That didn’t work. Instead, you got this.**

Pain, fear, suffering, defeat, death, failure, misery. Again and again. Sometimes, it drops you into scenes from your past, corrupting them and turning their resolution against you. When that stops working, it invents new scenarios to torment you:

Tavros runs you through and wipes your blood from a lance made of wind and shadows, chuckling to himself at your idiocy, your weakness.

Kanaya spits at you and knocks you to the ground. Her laughter, cold and mocking, follows you as you scramble to your feet and flee her, tears streaming down your face.

Aradia reaches out towards you, her hand tensing slightly. You try to explain, to ask for mercy, but a band of force closes around your neck, crushing your throat and spine. Satisfied, she tosses you aside like a discarded toy.

Again and again. Every time, the darkness finds you again. More and more, you accept it, even anticipate it eagerly, for the momentary reprieve it offers. You want to keep fighting, keep resisting, but despite yourself, you fell your defiance slowly ebbing away.

 **But hope, like love, is a strange thing, often found in the last place you look.**

“You’re a hard girl to find, Vriska.”

Aradia’s voice startles you, and you cringe away and squeeze your eyes shut, anticipating another round of torture.

“Jegus, it’s worse than I guessed,” she says quietly. “But don’t worry. We’re going to fix this.”

Eventually, you get the nerve to open your eyes again. Aradia hovers before you, face set in a concerned but determined frown. She’s decked out in full God Tier garb, red on red with red wings. It looks good on her. Gathering your wits, you ask, “I ... What are you talking about?”

“Your dream bubble,” she explains, matter-of-factly. “Something broke it; warped it. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out, and it does ...” She gestures at you vaguely. “... this. I grazed myself on the edges getting in here–metaphorically, of course. But you’re here in the middle of it, and you don’t have anything to protect yourself with, so it’s tearing you to pieces.”

You start to reply, but she cuts you off with a wave of her hand. “I found you, and now I need to get out before it starts reacting to my presence. Just breathe.” She not-quite-turns and moves in a direction your eyes can’t follow, vanishing.

Before you can react to her departure or start to ponder her words, something catches in your chest and-

 **And, together with a bit of luck (one might even say all of it), they can transform even the bitterest of endings into a new beginning.**

-you gasp for air, arching your back as, for the first time in a long, long time, you truly breathe. The movement sends little flickers of pain ricocheting through your body, quickly followed by a cascade of other, little discomforts: sore, stiff arms and legs, dry throat, aching eyes, stuffy nose. They aren’t exactly fun, but after your hellish escapades, you almost enjoy them.

“Man, I was really worried that wouldn’t work.” You open your eyes, squinting and blinking as they adjust to the light. John grins down at you tiredly, his face dripping with sweat. You start to move, and he places a hand lightly on your shoulder. “Hey, hold on,” he says, “We ... uh ... the green troll ... whats-her-name fixed you up pretty well, um, on the inside and stuff, but I think you should just rest for now. I don’t want you to hurt yourself by accident.”

That actually sounds like a pretty good idea. You close your eyes and lie back, letting out a tired sigh. A few moments you hear John rustling around close by. “Mind lifting up your head for a moment?” he asks. You comply, and he tucks a soft, satiny-feeling object under your head. You plop your head back down.

Quite quickly, consciousness slips away from you, but this time, no suffocating darkness swallows you. This time, you dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've revamped this piece twice now, and hopefully I'm done, finally. The more I looked at the non-Vriska parts of the piece, the less I liked them, so they're gone, and now it's all Vriska. I'm still not completely happy with the result, but hopefully I'll figure it out eventually.


	2. Vriska: Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vriska faces a difficult question: how do you repay someone who literally gave you life?
> 
> The answer, of course, is that you don't, but maybe you don't have to, either.
> 
> First, though, she has a score to settle.

“Just flip the fucking coin, Neophyte,” you snap, jabbing your finger at Terezi impatiently. Grim-faced, she obliges. As the coin arcs upward, an overpowering wave of deja vu surges over you. You blink and shake your head, grasping at it before it slips away. Unpleasant memories flood into your head: the pain of a blade piercing your back; the cold of the floor, pressed against your face; the slow creep of blood into your eyes and nose and mouth; the darkness, that terrible, terrible darkness swallowing you, again and again.

Yeah, you’ve been here before, more times than you care to consider. For a moment, you consider freaking out and trying not to die, again, but then it hits you: that little blink and head-shake? That wasn’t in the script.

More memories scurry back into your head, more welcome ones this time: air filling your lungs; John’s smiling, exhausted face; the brush of his hands as he tucks something soft under your head. You suppress a laugh. Of your God Tier powers, who’d have guessed that fully lucid dreaming would be one of the more useful ones?

You think quickly as the coin bounces twice on the lab’s metal floor. Talking probably won’t get you anywhere, as she’s either dreaming, as well, or a memory, a mindless image of your former rival. Actually, you really hope that she’s the former. It’ll make this more fun.

You play along with what you remember of the scene: grinning toothily at her and raising your hand in mocking farewell as you turn away from her. You take a step forward, flex your wings and wait ... until ... now!

You juke to the side as she lunges forward to stab you, grabbing her hand and taking advantage of her inertia to hurl her to the floor. Before she can realize what’s going on, you stomp on her hand, crushing her fingers and knocking the cane-sword from her grasp. As she tries to roll away, you kick her, as hard as you can, in the stomach. She reels slightly, but manages to get a little distance between the two of you. She gets onto her hands and knees and you kick her twice more: first in the head, then in the stomach again. Her head jerks back with the first blow, her glasses tumbling away and a streak of teal splashing across the floor. She spits out a tooth gamely, but when your foot slams into her stomach for the second time she collapses with a agonized gasp.

“Not so fun on the loooooooosing side, is it, Neophyte?” you say, rolling her over onto her back with the toe of your boot. She answers with a weak wheeze, her eyes unfocused with pain. “Yeah, well suck it up,” you snarl. “You put me through so much worse that literally _nothing_ I can do will _ever_ repay it.”

“I had t-” she gasps, but you press your boot into her neck and the sentence dies with a pained gurgle.

“No. Shut up. I gave you your chance, and you used it to kill me. That’s fine. When we wake up, I’ll smile and play nice and let bygones be bygones. Hell, I even wouldn’t mind continuing our rivalry, since nobody else in our little wiggling cluster comes close to being worth my time.” Your mouth twists into a sneer, and you spit out the next few sentences with very real hatred. “But right now, if you try to pull any ‘I had to protect everyone else’ or ‘it was just retribution for Tavros’s death’ bullshit, I’ll crush your throat and let you wake up that way. I’ve experienced that a few times, and trust me, it really sucks.”

You pause for a moment, then allow a smile to slowly slide across your face. “It’s funny, really,” you say. “Nobody else really seems to get it, but I remember the Team Scourge days. We were both killers, in the grand Alternian tradition, but I killed because I had to, because the culling drones would knock down my door and tear out my insides if I let my goddam lusus starve to death. Fucking hell does it feel good to say that, incidentally.” You let your grin widen and stare down into her unseeing eyes. “But you ... behind all the talk of ‘justice’ and ‘imperial law’ ... you just got off on watching them wriggle and kick after you talked them into your nooses.” She starts to open her mouth, but you continue, “Go ahead and deny it: to me, to Karkat and the others, even to the humans, if you want. I don’t mind if they keep thinking that you’re somehow better than me. We both know the truth. That’s enough.”

Very carefully, so as to not wake her up or give her an opening, you lean down and give her a little, chaste kiss on the forehead. “Catch you later, Redglare,” you murmur softly. You stand back up and lift your foot off of her throat. She scrambles away from you, snatching up her cane and pushing herself into a wobbly crouch.

Let it never be said that Vriska Serket can’t learn from her mistakes, at least when you want to. You flex your wings and slowly lift off from the platform, never taking your eyes off of her, in case she decides to show you her stabs, again. Still, you regret not pulling this whole affair off the first time through, especially given that she might not remember it when she wakes up. Whatever. Better late and in a dream bubble than never, right?

Figuring that you still have some time to kill, you dart up and out of lab-asteroid. With any luck (and you have that, aaaaaaaallllllll of it), the dream bubble’ll take you somewhere interesting.

To your disappointment, flying out of the lab merely takes you ... outside of the lab. The starless dark of the incipisphere surrounds you on all sides, replicated flawlessly by the dream (though, you can’t help but think, black emptiness can’t be very hard to imitate). You turn slowly in the void, allowing your eyes to drift over nearby asteroids in the Veil, Derse’s purple, twin-orbed silhouette and the distant, glowing orb of Skaia.

Wait.

Bec destroyed your Derse (and Prospit, of course), so what is a dream image of it doing here? Space shudders slightly as you fly forward to sate your curiosity, depositing you within close proximity of the twin planetoid far more quickly than you should have been able to arrive there. You don’t mind this particular brand of weird dream bubble shit, as a long, uneventful flight might have bored you awake, and you’d actually like to find out what’s up with the false-Derse.

And you see him.

John hovers before you with his back to you, staring down at Derse’s surface. A sleek blue hammer bearing your symbol rests easily in his hand, and the long, winding tail of his God Tier hood dances lightly in a breeze of its own making. Here is your god, your masterpiece, the finest of the humans forged into something even greater through your guidance and trickery.

Pride swells in your chest and paints a smile across your face. You’d always hoped to follow in Mindfang’s footsteps, to achieve greatness through conquest and blood, but perhaps, you reflect, you had it the wrong way around. She lived and died on Alternia, a single little planet in a single little solar system. She allowed fate to push her around, dying at the Summoner’s hands after an ultimately inconsequential life. You, on the other hand, have faced and defeated monsters that she could never even imagine. You have died and risen again, decked in divine light. You arranged the death of your chosen one on his own altar, allowing him to join you in godhood (and, you realize, inadvertently making possible your own second resurrection). And you accomplished it all in less than a perigee, while it took her an entire lifetime just to slip into obscurity and death.

And yet you can’t shake a vague uneasiness, something about John’s posture, perhaps? His too-straight back or the odd tilt of his head? You idly follow his gaze down towards Derse’s surface and then ... and then you can’t look away. There’s a strange, almost fractal beauty to the destruction: the twist of a shattered tower mirrored in a broken spine; the empty windows of an otherwise-intact house mimicking the glassy stares of the dead; two fallen buildings slumped against each other like a pair of lovers, tangled in their last moments.

And it goes on and on and on. The rubble and blood and corpses stretch away from you and John in all directions, all the way to Derse’s shadowed horizon. This, you think distantly, is the sort of thing Bec would do if he really cared about his work.

But Bec isn’t here.

“John?” you ask, quietly.

He whirls on you, fingers suddenly tight on the hammer. The expression on his face is the most un-John-like thing you could possibly imagine: no fear, no anger, no joy, not even any surprise, just calm, cold determination. For a moment, you actually think that he’ll take a shot at you.

Instead he just sort of ... slumps. The determination drains out of him, replaced first by confused realization and then by very real fear. His eyes dart away from you like skittish animals, first down towards Derse, then up and away, towards the empty darkness beyond the dreamforged facsimile of your/his Incipisphere.

“Dreaming?” he asks unsteadily, as though unwilling to trust himself with more than one word at a time. Eventually, he manages to get himself coherent enough to ask, “You and me, I mean? We are, right? Because I remember trying to ...” He frowns, trying to find the expression. “... give you the breath of life, I guess, but everything’s all fuzzy after that, and I can’t help but worry that we, or at least one of us, might be ... um ...” He trails off.

Urg. You hadn’t considered that possibility. It isn’t fair for him to be making you actually think about things, even in your dreams. Stupid double-edged God Tier powers. Well, you suppose this is the price you have to pay for getting a relatively consequence-free chance to kick the shit out of Terezi. Still, you distinctly remember falling asleep, not dying (again), so no reason to make him worry, right?

“Of course!” you say, surprising yourself with how much cheer and certainty you manage to cram into your voice, at least compared to how much of either emotion you actually have on hand. “You don’t think I’d be so inconsiderate as to die on you after you went to that aaaaaaaallllllll that trouble get-”

John doesn’t even let you finish your sentence. He plows into you, throwing his arms around you and squeezing like he’s never, ever wanted to do anything else. The two of you tumble together through empty space, and he babbles about how he’s so glad that everything worked out and he can’t wait to talk to you when you’re both awake and you better heal up quickly so that he can give you hugs like this in real life and yes he’ll go on a date if that’s something you still want and he hopes it isn’t too awkward to accept that sort of offer while asleep and on and on. You just laugh and let the sound of his voice roll over you. You don’t catch even half of what he’s saying, but who the hell cares? You’ve got him, he’s got you. You can worry about your injuries and what the others will say about Tavros’s death and even this bizarre dreamscape of John’s at a later date. You'll have all the time you could need to figure things out.

Aaaaaaaallllllll of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was actually a lot of fun to write. The beginning literally formed itself as I was writing, and I really like the way it turned out. Yeah, I like Vriska, but she's still a bit of a bluh bluh huge bitch.
> 
> Also, I realize that my dream bubble headcanon in here doesn't quite fit with true canon, but I hope it's a minor enough difference to be forgivable.


End file.
